The Fish You Don't See
Updated: 3 days ago
There is something slightly deceptive about a still water. You can stand on the bank, look across what appears to be a perfectly peaceful lake and quite reasonably conclude that absolutely nothing is happening. No fish rising, no splashes, no obvious signs of feeding. Just a bit of wind, some ripples and enough water to make you wonder why you bothered getting out of bed.
But beneath that apparently empty surface, things may be very different. The trout are still there, and they may be doing rather more than you think.
A quiet lake isn't necessarily a quiet lake
One of the traps of stillwater trout fishing is assuming that if you can't see a fish, there isn't one worth casting to. It is an understandable mistake. We're visual creatures, and seeing a trout break the surface gives us something definite to aim at.
But trout don't spend all their time showing themselves. Much of their feeding happens beneath the surface, where we can't see it. A trout can be cruising, searching for food or actively feeding without giving you the slightest indication that it is there.
The lake may look lifeless. It isn't.
Watch them move
Stillwater trout are rarely as stationary as they can appear. They move in response to food, temperature, oxygen and the conditions within the lake. Sometimes they will patrol a particular depth or follow a regular route. At other times they may be moving more widely, searching for whatever food is available.
This is why a fishery can sometimes feel completely different from one day to the next. Yesterday, the trout may have been close to the bank. Today, they might be several metres out. Yesterday, they may have been feeding near the surface. Today, they could be holding deeper.
The lake hasn't necessarily changed dramatically. The trout have simply changed what they're doing.
Look for the clues
This is where still water fishing becomes interesting. If the trout aren't showing, you need to start looking for clues rather than fish.
Watch the wind. A breeze pushing across the lake can move insects and other food sources, concentrating them in particular areas. The trout know this far better than we do.
Look at the surface. Are there tiny insects appearing? Is there the occasional movement that could be a fish rather than a wave? Are birds working over one particular area?
Look at the margins too. Sometimes the water closest to you can be more interesting than the expanse of open water that immediately catches your eye.
You are effectively trying to work out where the food is likely to be. Find the food and you may find the trout.
Don't ignore the insects
For the fly fisher, insects are perhaps the biggest clue of all. A trout doesn't eat a fly because it looks pretty. It eats because it resembles something it already recognises as food.
That might be a small insect drifting through the water, something emerging towards the surface or an insect trapped in the surface film.
And while you may see the occasional hatch taking place above the water, much of an insect's life happens below it. That means the trout may be feeding happily while the surface gives very little away.
This is one reason why an apparently dead lake can suddenly come alive. The food was there all along. We just weren't seeing it.
The danger of fishing only to what you can see
There is nothing wrong with fishing to a visible rising trout. In fact, it is one of the great pleasures of still water fly fishing.
But if you only ever cast when you can see a fish, you are giving yourself a rather unnecessary handicap. Imagine walking into a restaurant and deciding there was no food available simply because you couldn't see it from the doorway.
The trout aren't required to advertise their whereabouts. Sometimes you have to fish the water rather than the fish.
That means thinking about depth, retrieve, wind direction, likely food sources and where trout might reasonably be expected to spend their time.
Sometimes the first sign is a tug
There is another wonderful thing about fishing for fish you can't see. You can spend ten minutes convinced that nothing is happening, retrieving your fly through apparently empty water, and then suddenly...
Tug.
Your line tightens. The rod bends. And a trout that you had no idea was anywhere near you decides to make its presence very obvious indeed.
Those moments are one of the reasons stillwater trout fishing is so addictive. The fish was there. You just couldn't see it.
Trust the water
Learning to fish stillwaters effectively is partly about developing confidence in what you cannot see. That doesn't mean blindly casting and hoping for the best. Quite the opposite.
It means learning to read the evidence that the lake is giving you: the wind, the weather, the time of day, the depth, the insects, the surface, the behaviour of birds and the places where you've previously found fish.
All of these things are pieces of a puzzle. Put enough of them together and you can start to make an educated guess about what might be happening below the surface.
And sometimes that guess will be wrong.
That's fishing.
But the more you watch and learn, the better those guesses become.
The invisible part of fly fishing
Perhaps that's one of the things that makes stillwater trout fishing so fascinating. We spend so much time looking at the surface that it's easy to forget that the real action is often taking place underneath it.
A lake that looks empty may contain cruising trout, feeding trout, insects, food being carried by currents and an entire underwater world that we can only partly understand.
So the next time you arrive at a stillwater and can't see a single fish, don't immediately assume you're looking at a blank canvas.
Look a little harder. Watch the wind. Watch the water. Think about what the trout might be eating and where they might be.
Then make a cast.
Because the fish you don't see might just be the one that takes your fly.
And when the line suddenly tightens, you'll know something that the quiet surface didn't tell you.
There WAS always something going on.
